Describing a meal

This is Kallo's main way in. You write a sentence; Kallo returns dishes, ingredients, weights and nutrition for you to check and confirm.

How to write#

There is no required syntax. But a few habits make results noticeably better.

Say how it was cooked#

Cooking method moves fat more than almost anything else:

• grilled salmon and fried salmon — same fish, clearly different.
• steamed broccoli and stir-fried broccoli — the difference is the oil.
• roast chicken and fried chicken — a large gap.

Give weights when you know them#

A specific number always beats a guess. 150g grilled chicken breast is used as written, with no estimation applied.

Write the whole meal in one go#

grilled chicken breast + rice + steamed broccoli + an iced tea gives better results than four separate entries, because Kallo sees the whole meal at once and groups the dishes correctly.

What happens when you send#

Results stream in rather than appearing all at once. You will see the stages follow each other:

1. 1

   Breaking down the meal

   Your sentence is separated into dishes, each into ingredients, with cooking methods and any portion hints you gave. No grams are produced at this point.

2. 2

   Matching ingredients

   Each ingredient is looked up in the food composition data. Dish names appear first at this stage.

3. 3

   Anchoring the portion

   The weight gets settled. If you stated one, Kallo uses exactly that. If the dish is too ambiguous to settle, this step becomes a question for you.

4. 4

   Estimating nutrition

   For each matched ingredient, nutrition is computed with bounds, then collapsed to the figure shown.

When Kallo asks instead#

Sometimes you get a question rather than a number. That is intentional.

a bowl of soup could be 200ml or 700ml — too wide a gap to guess. Rather than quietly picking something in the middle, Kallo asks which bowl you used, and offers reference sizes with pictures to choose from.

Adjusting before you save#

Tap Edit to nudge each item. For ingredients measured in grams or millilitres each tap moves 10 units; for countable things, one unit per tap. Totals update live.

Dishes served in a vessel — bowls, cups, plates — also get a size picker with reference photographs.

Nothing is saved until you confirm.

When the result is wrong#

A few options, in the order worth trying:

1. Rewrite more specifically. Add the cooking method, add a weight, split the dishes out.
2. Adjust by hand after analysis. Faster than rewriting if only one item is off.
3. Use manual logging if you weighed the ingredients.
4. Send feedback. If an ingredient is missing or matched wrongly, tell us in Settings — it goes straight to the team.